CCIE Candidate

It’s 3 months to go before my first lab attempt, and I’m having one of those weeks.  I’m treading water at work, barely.  When the budget money frees up at the first of the year, all these different projects take off.  At varying levels of involvement, I’m tied up with a 10-gig upgrade for two [...]

One of my DNS servers lost its mind tonight - still not sure why.  Maybe I should update the DNS software approaching <ahem> a decade old.  It’s not exposed to the Internet, so it’s not a huge concern.  But when it died - man, what a domino effect.  I mean, it’s just my home network [...]

I’m trying something new today: I’m writing a mini-lab. My idea is to take a few topics I’m not the best at or would like to review, and roll them into a lab exercise. Today’s mini-lab stems from a couple of desires. One, I need to put up an IOS firewall [...]

I stumbled across this Brad Reese article on NetworkWorld.com today.  Brad answers these poignant questions:

When and how did the CCIE program begin?
What the heck is it with CCIE numbering?
Who really was the very first Cisco CCIE in history?

3560 IOS 12.2(25)SEE Commands for Spanning Tree
show spanning-tree - display large variety of STP information
spanning-tree backbonefast - root or blocked port listens immediately when inferior BPDU received
spanning-tree bpdufilter - port won’t send or receive BPDUs; can cause topology loops
spanning-tree bpduguard - err-disable port upon receipt of a BPDU
spanning-tree cost - set interface port cost where [...]

On Monday, I completed the last NetMasterClass.com DOiT Vol.2 practice lab.  Finally, all 25 of them are done. With a little more than 3 months left to my first lab attempt, what next in my preparation strategy?
One thought is that since I’m scheduled to go to bootcamp with Narbik Kocharians in February, I should [...]

Topics that interested me over the last several days of reading threads on the GroupStudy.com CCIE-LAB mailing list…

Check out this article about conditional static routes based on object tracking by Scott Morris. I’ve actually used this technique in our production network to solve an odd problem where we couldn’t use a dynamic routing protocol [...]

At long last, I have completed the NetMasterClass.com DOiT Volume 2 series of 25 full-scale practice labs. It’s been a long journey, having started back in August 2007. I wish I could say I know forwards and backwards everything that’s in these labs, but the fact is, I don’t. I’ve learned a [...]

Regular readers are aware that I’m headed to Pasadena, California in February to spend a week with Narbik Kocharians at his CCIE R&S lab bootcamp. Once I paid for the bootcamp, I received the eBook collection entitled “Soup-to-Nuts”. I’ve begun going through it, trying to get my head around what all is in [...]

I caught a great post on the GroupStudy.com CCIE-LAB mailing list from Bruno Wollmann, sporting his shiny new digits of 19817.
Click here to read Bruno’s story about failing the first time, and what he changed to pass the second time.  The story is detailed and well-worth the read.

IOS 12.4 EIGRP Commands
auto-summary (EIGRP) - auto-summarize networks on classful boundaries
clear ip eigrp neighbors - deletes neighbor adjacency and removes routes learned from neighbor
default-information - accept quad-zero routes inbound or advertise quad-zero outbound
default-metric (EIGRP) - sets bandwidth, delay, reliability, loading, and mtu for redistributed routes
distance eigrp - sets internal and external administrative distance for EIGRP [...]

Gleanings from the GroupStudy.com CCIE-LAB mailing list over the last few days…

An interesting practice page for prefix-lists.
Although nothing definitive was unearthed, there was some talk about what the PAgP keyword “non-silent” accomplishes. Related links on this topic follow.

http://www.groupstudy.com/archives/ccielab/200311/msg00633.html
http://www.groupstudy.com/archives/ccielab/200306/msg01526.html
http://www.groupstudy.com/archives/ccielab/200403/msg01452.html
Finally, I read this in the Doc CD about 5 times before it made sense. It’s [...]

A charitable soul commented this:
Along with reading your blog on a daily basis I also read CCIE Pursuit’s and IE’s blogs, it’s interesting to see where you are both up to and the differing strategies which you are employing in relation to tackling the lab. CCIE Pursuit currently rates himself at a readiness of 2 [...]

IOS 12.4 Commands for RIP
auto-summary - auto-summarization across classful boundaries
default-information originate - generates a quad-zero route into the RIP domain
default-metric - metric to assign to redistributed routes
flash-update-threshold - suppresses flash/triggered updates if interval is less than threshold
input-queue - packet buffer, tweak higher to prevent overflow on slow routers
ip rip authentication key-chain - enables authentication [...]

I’m going to start a new blog series called “10 Words Or Less”. The idea behind “10 Words Or Less” is to write a brief definition of every command on the Doc CD related to the CCIE routing & switching lab exam. One thing I haven’t done yet is gone through the Doc [...]